Introduction Vil
INTRODUCTION,
Anselm's life and works Anselm was an Italian from Aosta. He was born in 1033, at a time when a young man of enquiring mind would find others with similar interests travelling in search of education. Anselm began to travel after his mother's death, for at that time he quarrelled irrevocably with his father. For three years he wandered in Burgundy and the region of the Loire. He also spent time at Avranches, near MontSaint-Michel. By 1059 he had made his way to the monastery of Bec in central Normandy. This was a relatively new foundation, only twenty-five years old, and Herluin, its founder, was still abbot there. Anselm's reason for choosing it was probably that he had heard that Lanfranc (c.1005—89), then its Prior, was teaching there.
A studeht 'wandering scholar' at this time could usually attach himself to any master he chose. Anselm's friend and biographer,
Eadmer, tells us that Lanfranc's 'lofty fame had resounded everywhere and had drawn to him the best clerks from all parts of the world. Anselm therefore came to him and recognized the outstanding wisdom which shone forth in him. He placed himself under his guidance and in a short time became the most intimate of his disciples'.
In 1060 Anselm became more than a visiting student at Bec. At the age of 27, after a good deal of soul-searching, he became a monk of the monastery. In 1063 Lanfranc left Bec to become abbot of the abbey of Saint Etienne at Caen. That left Anselm as the principal teacher at Bec, and under his tutelage the character of the 'school' there changed. Anselm did not encourage 'external' pupils. He was interested in training the minds of the monks of Bec in ways which would foster their spiritual as well as their intellectual development.
His first major work reflects that concern directly. The Monologion begins with the explanation that it is a meditation on the 'divine essence', a subject Anselm had often discussed with his pupils, until they begged him to write down his teaching for them. The Proslogion, his next book, was written at the prompting of his own
' The Life of St Anselm by Eadmer, ed. R. W. Southern (Oxford, 1962), 8.
H Vili Introduction \ A Si bE MA Pe curiosity, but again he says his urge was to share with others the satisfaction it had given him to write it.
In 1075 Anselm would have thought of himself as someone little known in the world at large. In 1077-8 he was writing the Pros/ogion.
In 1078 he became Abbot of Bec. By 1085, people were reading his Monologion and Proslogion in France, England, and probably in Rome. So by that year Anselm was gaining a reputation for himself which went well beyond the confines of his monastery. That brought him his first painful experience of controversy.
He was briefly engaged in disputation with someone outside Bec before 1089, when Gaunilo, a monk from Marmoutier, challenged some of the arguments in his Pros/ogion. Anselm thought that he could defend himself against Gaunilo, and he was so pleased with the exchange that he gave instructions that Gaunilo's argument and his own response should always be copied at the end when the Pros/ogion was circulated.
Anselm's second major controversy was with Roscelin, and was quite different from his engagement with Gaunilo.
Now Anselm was dealing with an aggressive opponent, determined to treat him as an adversary. Roscelin (probably born about 1050 at Compiégne) was a teacher of theology and philosophy at various French schools. He was drawn to Anselm's attention in a letter from John, a monk at Beauvais, who said that Roscelin was claiming that the divine Trinity either included three distinct things, as three angels are three things, or that the Father and the Holy Spirit, became incarnate with the Son. Anselm was distressed to find his name linked with unorthodox teaching. He wrote On the Incarnation of the Word to explain his true position.
Much against his inclination, Anselm had been chosen in 1093 to be Archbishop of Canterbury in succession to Lanfranc. He wrote on one occasion to Eulalia, Abbess of Shaftesbury, 'I am so harassed in the archbishopric that if it were possible to do so without guilt, I would rather die than continue in it.' The problems for him lay not only in his dislike of administration, although he always sought to do it conscientiously. It went deeper. He found his sense of order challenged when his duty of obedience to the Pope came into conflict with his duty of obedience to the King (William Rufus). Soon after Anselm became Archbishop William requested £1,000 from him to finance an expedition to Normandy. Anselm refused the sum because
Introduction ix he felt that paying it would lead to hardship for his tenants. As Eadmer explains, he also took it upon himself 'to solicit the King for the relief of the Churches which were daily going to ruin, for the revival of the Christian law which was being violated in many ways, and for the reform of morals which every day and in every class of people showed too many corruptions'." When William returned from Normandy, Anselm asked permission to go to Rome to receive his pallium (the symbol of his appointment as Archbishop) from Pope
Urban II. But William did not wish to recognize Urban II as Pope and a majority of the English bishops sided with him.
Anselm was able to receive his pallium in 1095, and there ensued an uneasy peace between him and the King. But in the summer of 1097 William was complaining about the quality of the troops
Anselm had provided under his duty to the King for a military exercise in Wales. Anselm begged to be allowed to go to Rome to ask
Urban to resolve things, and when permission was given at last he reached: Rome in April 1098. He stayed away from England until after William's death in 1100.
He had begun his major work Why God Became Man early in his Archbishopric, and perhaps a little before. He finished it in the high mountain air of his native Alps. On the same journey he worked on the treatise On the Virgin Conception and Original Sin, and after the Council of Bari in 1098 he began writing On the Procession of the Holy
Spirit, which he finished in r102. The Council at Bari was attended by a number of Greek Christians, anxious to discuss the issues on which the schism of East and West had occurred in 1054—although in fact there had been more politics than theology in the rift at the time. The most important of these was the question whether the Holy Spirit proceeded from God the Father alone or from both God
° the Father and God the Son. The Greeks maintained that the Spirit proceeded from God the Father alone; the Western Church held that the Spirit proceeded both from the Father and from the Son, and it was on this that the Pope asked Anselm to speak at the Council.
Anselm asked for a day or two to prepare his thoughts and then sought to win round the Greeks to the Western view. He was unsuccessful but undaunted, and became sufficiently interested to want to write his treatise, which appeared four years later, in 1102.
2 The Life of St Anselm by Eadmer, 69.
eee ee cee asi a x .
Introduction
William Rufus's successor, Henry I, welcomed Anselm.back to England. But it soon became clear that Anselm found his policies on the Church as unacceptable as those of William. Anselm thought that in loyalty to the Pope he ought to dispute the rights the King was claiming in the investiture of bishops. It was uncontentious that a king had a right to invest a new bishop with the lands or temporalities of his see. But it was becoming common for kings and emperors to go further into the sacramental domain and try to invest them with the spiritualities too, by giving them the ring and staff of their pastoral office. Anselm was conscious that an attempt had been made to do this to him, and glad that he had resisted, although at the time he had not yet understood the implications, and his objections had had more to do with his sincere reluctance to be made Archbishop at all.
Anselm left England again in the face of this disagreement, but Urban II's successor, Paschal II, made a compromise solution with Henry I, and although Anselm did not find it satisfactory, obedience required him to accept it. He returned to England in 1106. Eadmer says that Anselm was received 'with great joy and honour by the Church' and also that 'the King was heartily glad that he had made his peace with Anselm'.' But Anselm was now 73 years old, and his health was failing. At Easter 1107 he was seriously ill, and although he was working on the De Concordia, and said that he wanted to live long enough to write a study of the origin of the soul, his health broke down completely from this time. He died 'as dawn was breaking on the Wednesday before the institusion of the Lord's Supper, on 21 April in the year of our Lord's Incarnation 1109, which was the sixteenth year of his pontificate, and the seventy-sixth of his life'.* The Monologion Anselm's Monologion is a reflection: or 'meditation' on the divine essence (divina essentia), which he composed after years of teaching his monk-pupils at Bec and discussing the problem with them. He begins by postulating that there is something which is best (optimum), greatest (maximum), highest (summum). The task is to establish whether there really is any such thing and if so how we can get any
The Life of St Anselm by Eadmer, 138.
* Thid. 142.
Introduction xi idea of what it is like (what its attributes are). Anselm points out that everyone has an idea of what good is from the pleasures of everyday life. He likens it to the climbing of a ladder. One begins by contemplating something whose goodness one can easily understand, and then places in a hierarchy higher and higher familiar goods, and so climbs up, until one is able to begin to get an idea of what the highest
Good may be like.
But the 'being of God' (divina essentia) in Christian thought is not only something with 'attributes', such as goodness and justice and mercy and truth, but also threefold, since the Godhead is Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit. In the Monologion Anselm explores the ideas which lead him by pure reasoning to the doctrine of the Trinity.
What he says owes a great deal to his reading of the De Trinitate (On the Trinity) of St Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Although he does not quote him, he borrows some of Augustine's 'psychological' images: of memory, will, and understanding (memoria, voluntas, intellectus); mind, knowledge, love (mens, notitia, amor). Like Augustine,
Anselm was drawn to the idea that human beings have a single 'self' while having in their heads different faculties by which they inhabit or express that self. Now this is dangerous ground. If it is pressed too far one way, the persons of the Trinity look like mere aspects or faculties of the one God, and if it is pressed too far the other way, they begin to look like three Gods. Anselm had not yet met controversy, but he instinctively steered a finely adjusted course here. His main interest, like Augustine's, was in the relationship of the persons to one another, and there he was on the firm ground of being able to argue that it was entirely likely that the creation would reflect the Creator and that God would leave footprints in the minds of the rational creatures he had made to enable them to find their way to him by contemplation of their own deepest nature. His approach is to use pure reasoning, so as to show the rationality of the faith he is seeking to heighten in his readers. So this is a philosophical as well as a theological book.
The letter Anselm included for his old master Lanfranc, then Archbishop of Canterbury, when he sent him the Monologion for his approval, is translated below as an introduction to the text. Lanfranc was slow in responding, and Anselm sent reminders by former monks of Bec who were now in Lanfranc's'household in Canterbury. Lanfranc's eventual reply and Anselm's reaction to it were
xii
Introduction important in fixing his habits of independence as a scholar. Lanfranc criticized the book, not for anything Anselm had said in it, but because he had not included quotations from authoritative authors to support what he had said. The Monologion was 'published' (that is, copied and circulated) as it stood.
The Proslogion The Proslogion was a sequel to the-Monologion. Anselm felt impelled to write it by the fact that he had been left with a sense of dissatisfaction when he had completed the Monologion. He recognized that the Monologion consisted of a chain of arguments, and his sense of economy and elegance of argumentation presented him with the idea that there ought to be just one argument (wnum argumentum) on which all the themes of the Monologion could be made to depend.
He suffered agonies of effort and a worrying distraction at prayer while he was trying to hit on this argument; when he found it, it burst upon him in a flood of pleasure.
The argument holds that nothing greater than God can be conceived to be and that God cannot even be conceived not to be.
Sometimes called 'the Ontological Argument', it is probably that for which Anselm is best known today, for it has been very much discussed by philosophers of religion." Its basic idea is that God is 'something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought'. Anyone who examines that idea will have to admit that for something-thanwhich-nothing-greater-can-be-thought to exist in reality would be greater than for it to exist in the mind alone. Something-than-whichnothing-greater-can-be-thought, Anselm argues, must therefore exist in reality as well as in the mind. For the modern reader that involves a considerable leap. But Anselm had a Platonic sense of what
'reality' is. In the Platonic tradition, what is in thought, in intellect, in idea, is more 'real' than what is concrete and measurable by the senses. So to move from having an idea in the mind to saying that there is a reality to which it corresponds is an altogether different kind of shift from that which would be made by saying that when- * ° See John Hick and Arthur McGill (eds.), The Many-Faced Argument (London,
1967). See also Jonathan Barnes, The Ontological Argument (London, 1972).
Introduction xiii ever I think of the 'best possible' of any kind of thing, it must follow that it really exists.
So according to Anselm, God cannot be thought of simply as a concept which people have. He thinks that people who deny God's existence can nevertheless be thought of as having some concept of God, for, so he says, they have some idea of what it is whose existence they deny. But, so Anselm suggests, reflection on the meaning of the word 'God' shows that God cannot fail to exist not only in the minds of those who have an idea of him but also in reality, and that someone who says 'there is no God' is ultimately propounding what must necessarily be a falsehood.° Anselm saw this argument as paving the way for some serious reflection on what we might mean when we use the word 'God'. He thought of his unum argumentum as showing, not only that God exists, but also that God is what Christians believe God to be. So, from Chapter 3 of the Pros/ogion onwards, and drawing on the reasoning of that chapter and Chapter 2, Anselm reflects on the notion of God as 'something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought', to develop a defence of the teaching that God is omniscient, omnipotent, merciful, just, simple, limitless, and eternal. In doing so,
Anselm presents a series of essays in philosophical theology remarkable for their rigour as well as for their clarity.
Here he began to develop an ingenuity made necessary by the constraints of truths which were hard to reconcile, but which nevertheless had to be included for the sake of orthodoxy. For example, if God is merciful it is hard to see how he can also be 'impassible', as orthodoxy required. The Supreme Being clearly could not be upset by human suffering in any way which disturbed his changelessness.
On the other hand, he evidently minded about it enough to send his Son to redeem the world. Anselm argued that when God is merciful we 'feel' the effect of the mercy, but God does not 'feel' mercy in any way which disrupts the divine tranquillity.
The Proslogion is also remarkable among Anselm's treatises for the ° This is the drift of Chapters 2 and 3 of the Pros/ogion. Readers should note that there has been much scholarly discussion concerning the details of what is being argued in these chapters. For an introduction to this discussion, see Jasper Hopkins, A Nem,
Interpretive Translation of St Anselm's Monologion and Proslogion (Minneapolis, 1986),
3-33:
.Y , XiV '
Introduction way in which it alternates passages of prayer and passages of plain argument. The difference is reflected in the style, which is full of devices to be found in his prayers and meditations (as in Chapter 1); his style is entirely free of such literary devices in, for example,
Chapters 2-4, which contain tight philosophical and theological arguments. Anselm meant it to be a devotional work, and that has a bearing on the question of what he was hoping to achieve in the ontological argument.
A token of this devotional purpose is the development in the last two chapters of Anselm's idea of what heaven will be like. He points out that heaven would not be heaven if it is not the best possible place to be, and he argues that even all innocent pleasures on earth, such as running fast, will for that reason necessarily have their heavenly counterpart.
Gaunilo, a monk of Marmoutiers, had objections to raise against — some of the arguments of the Pros/ogion, and he put them to Anselm in his Pro Insipiente (On Behalf of the Fool). Anselm was delighted to have so intelligent a critic, and wrote a reply, explaining that the argument would work only for God because God has a reality of a unique kind. Anselm himself directed that his Proslogion should be published together with Gaunilo's reply to him and his reply to Gaunilo—and so they are in this volume. Readers should pay very special attention to Anselm's reply to Gaunilo, for it is, effectively, a commentary on the Pros/ogion from its author. v The De Grammatico The De Grammatico is probably Anselm's earliest work. It is concerned with the question 'can an adjective such as "white", which in Latin is also a substantive or noun ("a white thing") signify a quality or accident only, or a substance as well?' In Latin there is no distinction between adjectives and nouns as parts of speech, and it is often hard to tell in a sentence whether albus is being used as one or the other. This was of interest to Anselm and his pupils for a number of reasons. Until the eleventh century there had been very little study of logic, although everyone had studied grammar in the process of learning Latin. It was therefore only when they began to compare the Roman grammar-books (by the late Roman grammarians Priscian and Donatus) with the textbooks on logic (by Boethius, who trans-
: t
\ ; oe Introduction Xv lated and commented'on Porphyry and some of Aristotle's logical works in the sixth century) that they realized that these authorities disagreed. The treatise Anselm wrote On the Incarnation of the Word a is about a variant of this same problem. Anselm had been using an image which played on the dilemma about whether (in Latin) 'white' merely describes a substance or signifies 'a white substance' in order to try to throw light on the question 'What are the Persons of the Trinity?' That led him into fierce controversy, as that treatise shows
(see below). And Anselm was in any case strongly interested in the nature and working of language, as all his writings show.
Because this is the most technical of Anselm's treatises, it has a special introductory note in this translation.
The 'three treatises' On Truth, On Free Will, and On the Fall of the Devil The 'three treatises pertaining to the study of Holy Scripture' were written between 1080 and 1086. Like the De Grammatico, they take the form of a dialogue between 'Teacher' and 'Student'. These dialogues are not like catechisms, in which the student gives formal, set answers. They are closer to the 'Socratic' dialogue form used by Plato, in which there is a real conversation, although Augustine, not Plato, was Anselm's immediate model. They all include close studies of one or two biblical texts, designed as models for students so that they could see how to apply the same methods to other texts.
The first treatise, On Truth, arose out of what Anselm felt to be some unfinished business in his Monologion. The 'student' asks him at the beginning of the book to explain what he had meant there when he spoke of 'truth'. Teacher and student together work out that truth—which can be in actions as well as in statements—has to do with things being as they ought to be. A true statement, for example, says that what is so is so or that what is not so is not so. This is an important theme in Anselm's thought. In the treatise Why God
Became Man he writes of 'right order' (rectus ordo) and it is essential to his argument that there was something that fallen man ought to have done for his Creator, or owed to his Creator, and was not doing because of his sinful state.
The topic of the second treatise in the series followed naturally from the first, as teacher and student talk about 'freedom of choice'.
XVI P Introduction There is a difference between the title of Anselm's work and that of Augustine, who wrote a book 'On Free Will' (De Libero Arbitrio).
Anselm is interested not only in the ways in which the wills of rational creatures can be free to choose, but also in the way they make choices and how it can be judged whether their choices are good or bad. Anselm and his pupil decide, in accordance with the principles they have worked out in the treatise On Truth, that choices made by creatures with free will are good if they are as they ought to be.
The subject-matter of the mene treatise in the series, On the Fall of the Devil is also a natural sequel. The choice Satan made to do what he ought not to do was also a failure to 'stand fast in the truth',
John 1: 44. Anselm was pioneering new ground here in certain respects. Much had been written about the fall of Adam and Eve, but the fall of the Devil is, if anything, a greater puzzle. These angels enjoyed the very presence of God before they fell and they were pure spirit, purely rational beings. Since God cannot be the author of evil and he made them, it is extremely difficult to explain how they can even have got the idea of disobedience. Anselm argues that what Satan did wrong was to desire something (to be like God) which was in itself a good thing, but which he wanted to a degree not possible for his created nature, high though it was. So his fault had to do with wanting something he ought not to have wanted. It was a breach of rectus ordo, which carried its own terrible inescapable consequences.
On the Incarnation of the Word Anselm wrote the book On the Incarnation of the Word to try to meet
Roscelin's claims. He first sought to explain that what had happened was that Roscelin had misunderstood some analogies which he had tried to draw between speaking of someone as 'white' and 'literate' and speaking of 'a white man' or 'a literate man'. This was of course exactly the same problem as the one he had written about in the De
Grammatico, and it uses the same examples (albus, grammaticus).
Anselm had merely thought it would be helpful for students to think, with the aid of this illustration, about the way the persons of the 'Trinity could be distinct persons without being three Gods. He had certainly not meant them to understand that there were three Gods
| Introduction XVil in the Godhead. But his first response' was pounced upon with glee by Roscelin who said that Anselm had proved himself a heretic more thoroughly than ever. Anselm learned the hard way that not everyone was humbly in search of the truth and receptive to rational explanations. His final version of about 1094, the one translated here, is a careful exposition of what Anselm hoped would prove an uncontroversial position.
Among the ideas he looked at in this text were some which were to prove useful when he wrote On the Procession of the Holy Spirit.
Why God Became Man and On the Virgin Conception and Original Sin It is probable that Anselm was prompted to address the question he tackles in the Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man) by conversations he had in the winter before his elevation to the archbishopric, while he was staying at the Abbey of Westminster. The Abbot who was his host was Gilbert Crispin, who had been a monk of Bec and was the only one of Anselm's former pupils to make his own mark as a theologian and writer. He wrote a Disputation with a Jew* about this time, in which he set about proving to a Jewish believer the necessity for the incarnation. Anselm uses a dialogue form—as he had done in the De Grammatico and the 'three treatises'-—but whereas there the disputants had been "Teacher and Student',
Anselm now took the characters of himself and Boso, another of the monks of Bec who had formerly been his pupil. 'Boso' takes the part of the 'unbeliever'.
Anselm sets out to show that even if we know nothing about Christ through Christian revelation, it would be necessary to postulate that God became human in order to explain how the redemption of the human race could be possible. That is a bold attempt, because—as — Hugh of St Victor in his De Sacramentis Ecclesiae in the next generation was to recognize—there had always been two departments of Christian theology. The first concerns the existence and nature of God, the doctrine of the Trinity, and the creation of the world. All these are subjects with which classical philosophy also deals, and in 7 In Anselmi Opera Omnia, vol. 1.
8 In The Works of Gilbert Crispin, ed. A. S. A. Abulafia and G. R. Evans (Oxford,
1986).
XVili 'Introduction large measure they can be approached by reasoning alone. These are what Hugh was to call 'the work of creation' (opus creationis). But there is also a part of Christian theology which depends upon a knowledge of historical events, the birth and life and death of Christ, his resurrection, the 'work of restoration' (opus restaurationis). What
Anselm was proposing was to discuss the second by pure reasoning, without depending on the authority of Scripture, or any other authority, to support his argument at any crucial point.
The thrust of his argument is that God had been dishonoured by human sin. Anselm had a concept of 'honour' here which was feudal in origin. For him it meant that something much more than God's dignity was at stake. His very being was challenged by the falling away of humanity. Because he is all-powerful, he could not let that continue without doing something about it, or he would have been untrue to himself. He would not have been what he ought to be.
But if God himself had restored humanity to sinlessness by an action of his own (which he certainly had the power to do), that would not have restored right order, because it was humanity, not God, which owed the obligation to return to goodness. On the other hand, humanity could not put things right for itself, because although it owed the debt, it lacked the power. Anselm looks at the possibility that an angel could have acted on behalf of humanity to do what was necessary, but he dismisses it. There is not only the objection that an angel is not the debtor, but also the problem that while all human beings are linked together by birth, so that one man can act on behalf of the whole race, ingels are separate individual creations, and cannot act together in one of their number in the same way. The only solution appears to be the one God used: for a Godman to be born who would both have the power to put things right and be a member of the race on whose behalf the putting-right needed to be done. Thus was God's honour restored.
Anselm thought it in one respect incomplete, because it did not give a full answer to the question about the manner in which it was possible for Christ to be fully human without being tainted with original sin. One area which contemporaries were telling him needed exploring was the related question whether the Virgin Mary was herself free of sin. Why God Became Man also has a Medithtion on Human Redemption as a companion-piece which space does not allow us to include in this volume.
Introduction xix On the Procession of the Holy Spirit Anselm found himself writing the treatise On The Procession of the Holy Spirit because something permanent seemed to be needed by way of a record of what he had said at the Council of Bari where the Greeks were raising objections to the addition to the creed of the clause 'and the Son' in the Western liturgy. His main argument is that only if the Holy Spirit proceeds from both Father and Son is there that symmetry in the relations of the persons of the Trinity which would seem to be required by what we know of the nature of God.
Anselm also wrote the Letters on the Sacraments (not included here') as a result of his encounters with the Greek Christians at the Council of Bari. One of the grounds on which the schism with the Greeks had taken place was the difference of usage of leavened or unleavened bread in the Eucharist. Anselm argued that the bread was
'substantially' the same in both cases and that this should therefore not be a Church-dividing matter. The Letters are thus of some ecumenical importance.
De Concordia Anselm's last major work was his attempt to bring together in a coherent way, and to complete, the various discussions of his earlier writings on the question of the relationship of divine predestination and foreknowledge with the work of grace and the operation of human freedom of choice.
Can there be genuine human freedom given that God is the allknowing maker of the world of space and time? In the De Concordia, Anselm (echoing Augustine) argues that God can know only what is really the case and that, if people act freely, then God knows that they do so, from which it would seem to follow that God's
| knowledge is no threat to human freedom. In a tradition stemming from Boethius (c.480—524) to St Thomas Aquinas (c.1224-74), he also argues that since God's knowledge is timeless and is therefore not, strictly speaking, foreknowledge, it is compatible with the existence of human free agents. And he fills out his argument by suggesting that, though creatures achieve their good by virtue of God,
° They can be found in the translation of Hopkins and Richardson ('Toronto and New
York, 1974-6).
XX , Introduction the good to which they rise is a good to which they rise by virtue of God. On Anselm's account, God makes us what we are, and we could not be what we are without God—from which, .so Anselm thinks, it follows that God is positively needed if we are to exist as free human creatures.
The Philosophical Fragments The translations in this volume end with the fragmentary 'philosophical' work which looks at the issues of 'will, power, and necessity', which Anselm addresses in Why God Became Man, and the concepts of power and action, on which Anselm did not have the advantage of knowing Aristotle's teaching, and which therefore represent his own original explorations. These philosophical fragments" are authentic Anselm, but they represent an incomplete work, or more probably, working notes towards writings which do not survive in a finished form. Some of the ideas with which they are concerned are developed in what Anselm says about 'will, power, and necessity' in Why God Became Man. Their interest in the problems about 'doing' and 'being able' runs through many of Anselm's treatises.
Anselm's other writings In addition to the works included in this volume, Anselm was also the author of nineteen prayers, three meditations, and a large body of letters. Anselm wrote the first group of his letters in the years during which he was at Bec and before he became Archbishop. They best reflect his private concerns and his personal sense of priorities.
They tell us a good deal about his gift for friendship. They also, like the prayers and meditations and the chapters of the Proslogion which are themselves prayers, show us the Anselm who wrote
Latin for its beauty as well as with clarity. They contain numerous stylistic devices: antitheses, parallelisms, climaxes, paradoxes. The remainder of the letters are mostly about business, and they may not be Anselm's in every word, as the earlier ones certainly are. %
" Edited in Memorials of St Anselm, ed. R. W. Southern and ES. Schmitt (London, 1969).
Introduction XXx1 Influence and achievement As sources for his thinking, Anselm had the incomparable riches of the Bible and the writings of Augustine and other Western Fathers, such as Jerome (¢.342-420), Gregory the Great (540-604), and Bede
(c.673—735). He also had the advantage of ten years at Bec to read and absorb them before he began to write. The mode of reading taught in monastic schools was /ectio divina, a slow, patient, reflective
'chewing' and ruminating which made the texts so studied ineradicably part of the furnishings of the minds which thus absorbed them.
Anselm was unusual in that he responded not by quoting and citing authors he read as 'authorities', strung respectfully together, but by using them as points of departure for his own often wholly original thought.
Anselm had a remarkably limited range of books to draw upon in forming his mind as a philosopher. He lived at a period before even a complete'set of the works of Aristotle on logic, let alone those on scientific subjects, was available in Latin, and he had no opportunity to learn Greek. There was almost no direct access to the other fundamental source of ancient Greek philosophy, Plato, except
Calcidius' commentary on the Timaeus, and it is far from certain that Anselm can have read that. There was, however, a great deal of Platonism to be had, especially in the ideas transmitted by Augustine. And Anselm responded warmly and naturally to a Platonic way of thinking about the nature of reality.
He was never unorthodox. It was always his anxious care not to mislead those he sought to instruct. His special gift was clarity. He believed without reserve in the power of conviction of a rational argument, well set out, and, indeed, in the early days at Bec he evidently found this conviction to be justified because of the receptive pupils he had there. This method of simply explaining things clearly was the way he preferred to go on working in later life, although he came to recognize that it would be uphill work to convince those determined to resist his arguments. But a faith seeking understanding could, he remained certain, only be reinforced in its grasp of the truth by patient rational analysis. He was also profoundly drawn to the idea of 'order'. The right order in things, the 'oughtness' of truth and righteousness, of right willing and divine intention, form over and over again the basis on which he builds a solution to a problem.
x XXxii :
Introduction As to evil, he held with Augustine that ultimately it is ngthing, but he has some practical ways of treating it as a 'sort of something' for purposes of argument, so that he can take realistic account of its fearful impact on human lives in the form of sin.
This peculiar character of his work gave it a mixed reception in the next generation. There were those, especially monastic scholars, who continued to recognize its quality, and Anselm would often be included in sets of extracts from the Fathers in twelfth-century collections, along with Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) and Hugh of St Victor (c.1096—1141), as though he stood alongside Augustine and Gregory the Great as an 'authority'. But for the scholars working in the new contentious climate of the twelfth-century schools, which were growing into universities, the priorities were different. What was needed was teaching material which could be condensed and retailed efficiently in lecture-courses. Anselm's treatises do not lend themselves to that sort of treatment. They are always economical already and the highly integrated sequence of their argumentation does not readily permit the making of short extracts.
Although Peter Abelard (1079-1142) saw in the first half of the twelfth century that Anselm's account of why God became man had to be taken seriously before it was set aside in favour of his own view
(that Christ came merely to set an example of the way the Christian life should be lived), it was not until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that scholars began to take Anselm seriously as a thinker of stature who had had a number of,ideas of perennial value and importance.
Thomas Aquinas (¢.1225—74), though he is fundamentally out of sympathy with the line taken by Anselm in Why God Became Man, still invokes important elements of Anselm's arguments when talking of Christ and the salvation wrought by him. And, though sternly rejecting arguments which look similar to what Anselm offers in Chapters 2 and 3 of the Proslogion, Aquinas is in many ways at one with Anselm when it comes to the question of what can and cannot be known of God by reason.
Aquinas realized that the ontological argument was at root an argument that God's existence is self-evident, and that it therefore falls into a different category from arguments for the existence of God which depend on looking at his creation and drawing the conclusion that someone or something must have brought it into being.
Introduction XXiil In the twentieth century philosophers are still trying to discover where the flaw in the ontological argument may lie. The arguments of Why God Became Man still preoccupy theologians, for the doctrines of the incarnation and redemption are central to the Christian faith.'' Philosophers of language continue to study the problems about signification-theory and the deep structure of language with which Anselm was grappling."
Readers of the present translations will find in Anselm a mind of elegance and beauty and steady faith. He was a truly original thinker who wrote with a rigour and cogency which would put many theologians and philosophers to shame. He brought his mind to bear on the perennial questions of philosophers and theologians and his concerns are very much those of anyone thinking seriously about religion and philosophy today. His discussions of them are as well worth reading now as they were when he wrote them.
"| See Dayid Brown, '"Necessary" and "Fitting" Reasons in Christian Theology', in William J. Abraham and Steven W. Holtzer (eds.), Festschrift for Basil Mitchell (Oxford,
1987), 211-30.
2 J. Hopkins, A Companion to the Study of St. Anselm (Minneapolis, 1972), gives a useful bibliography of studies in the first half of the zoth cent. and beyond.